enthusiastic, full of native ability, fire, and brilliancy, born poets and artists; they were incapable of prolonged effort, impatient under disaster, fickle, and excitable. The readiness with which they acquired a tinge of Roman civilization was only surpassed by the completeness and rapidity with which they lost it; their daring in battle equalled, but equalled in vain, the incoherency and incompetency of their plans. Apart, both natures were singularly and fatally defective, but their respective good qualities were such as were exactly calculated mutually to supply their respective deficiencies, and their union has resulted, and will still result, in the formation of a national character complete, powerful, and admirable, as I believe, beyond comparison.

At the time with which we are now concerned, the long continued influx of the Saxons had resulted in the gradual conquest of perhaps two-thirds of the island, and in the establishment of a number of small kingdoms subject to almost constant change, consequent upon the competency and ambition, or the reverse, of their rulers, and upon other circumstances incident to a semibarbarous age. These kingdoms are familiarly known to us as the Heptarchy, or seven-fold rule, a name which cannot certainly be regarded as correct, since the number was variable and even uncertain, but which upon the whole approximates perhaps to the truth. The method of the formation of these petty sovereignties we can readily understand. The invasion of England had been the result of no definite plan, but had been accomplished by a large number of independent expeditions, each of which must have been under the command of some chief, of however laxly defined authority. The necessities of self-preservation in a hostile country would of necessity lead to a bond of union for purposes of mutual defence amongst an indefinite number of these bodies, and would so confer increased prominence and power upon the leader of their combined forces; and always the larger and more powerful these combinations became, the more it would be to the advantage of other bodies to attach themselves to them. However independent at home, the minor chieftain would have no alternative but to secure the possession of his settlement by union with a centralised

authority, which he would be bound to obey, just as that would be bound to defend him. Hence, whatever the nominal title, estates would practically be held by a kind of rudimentary feudal tenure, and there would be nothing to hinder the suzerain, when he felt his power sufficiently assured, from assuming the title of a King, as in fact he was exercising the kingly office. Some of the kingdoms thus created were of course more, and some less stably constituted ;-our present business is to see what position amongst them was held by Mercia.

The very name will to a large extent help us to form some adequate idea of its condition and circumstances. Mercia means a boundary, a limit. The Mark, or March, which formed the frontier of all advanced and exposed territory, was in fact the Debateable Land, the No-Man's-Ground, the scene of constant struggle and uncertainty, and strange as it may seem to us, denizens of what is now the very heart of the most civilized land on earth, it is nevertheless true that the district we inhabit was once the wild Far West of civilization, the very outpost and frontier of advancing progress. An appreciation of this fact will make it easy for us to understand how the kingdom of Mercia,-as it had been the last to attain to the position of an independent state, was also the last to relinquish the old idolatrous worship, and to submit to the milder influences of Christianity. It lay with its western boundary confronted from end to end by the mountainous region of Wales, a region purely Celtic, and so difficult of conquest that it was not until centuries had elapsed even after the Norman conquest, that its entire subjugation was effected. We shall not then be likely to err in conjecturing that the Debateable Land of Mercia must have been the natural resort of the fiercest and least cultivated of the Saxon tribes,-the home of the untamed spirits, prone to conflict, little disposed to settled order, and impatient under restraint; who must have found in its circumstances the congenial atmosphere of a freedom untempered by law, and seasoned by perpetual conflict. Of the reality of the constant, though loosely organised warfare between the invading tribes, and the native inhabitants of our country, the chronicles I have referred to

give proofs which, if brief, are conclusive. There is perhaps no portion of our national history upon which more complete misapprehension exists than upon the character and fate of our Celtic ancestors. It is not too much to say that the idea generally prevalent is that the ancient Britons were either exterminated, or driven helplessly across the island to take refuge among the almost inaccessible mountains of Wales, and that they thenceforth disappear from history, no longer to be calculated as a component part of the English people. It is scarcely worth while to combat the notion of a wholesale extermination, which the known character of the Saxons renders improbable, while the state of the country, abounding as it did in forests, morasses, and desolate wastes, would have rendered it impossible. Suffice it to say that even as regards large and organised communities of the Celts, no such complete extermination or expulsion had taken place in Saxon kingdoms far more settled than the kingdom of Mercia, even within a quarter of a century of the Christianising of Kent. Thus we learn from Bede that in 571 the Britons were defeated so far east as Bedford, and that the victors took possession of the four towns of Leighton, Aylesbury, Benson, and Eynsham as the result of their victory; while it was not until 577 that the West Saxons obtained cities so important, and so little remote as Gloucester, Cirencester and Bath. Data such as these may be entirely irreconcilable with the preconceived opinions of historians and students of history to whom the high sounding, but often resultless achievements of the great are all, and the obscure story of the formation of a vital national character nothing; yet they will not be neglected by those whose only object is truth, nor can they be regarded as beside the question in assisting us to form a just idea of the condition and circumstances of England, and of Mercia, in the seventh century.

The Celts had long been at any rate nominally Christians, but this fact was in no way calculated to recommend the truth to their Teutonic invaders, who indeed appear to have been profoundly imbued, as regarded the aboriginal race, with that contempt with which the very practical are apt to regard those of a different temperament. It is very unlikely that the Saxons would ever

have received religious teaching of any kind from the Celts, whose religion they would probably regard as one element of their weakness. Christianity, however, proffered by the stately and far reaching power of Rome, and preached by men of ability and prudence such as Augustine and Paulinus, presented itself under circumstances much more favourable to acceptance; and met indeed with a success, and an absence of serious opposition little in accordance with the views of those who have been pleased to represent our Teutonic forefathers as a horde of pernicious barbarians. Augustine and his companions arrived in Kent in 597, and the Christianizing of this, the most polished of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, appears to have been the work of scarcely more than a year. In 604 the conversion of the East Saxons followed, and the see of London was founded. By 627 Paulinus had accomplished his work in the great kingdom of Northumbria, the extent of which was then commensurate with the meaning of its name. Into the details of the continued advance of this new faith, it is not my purpose now to enter, suffice it to say that little more than half a century sufficed for the almost total extinction of Paganism, except in Mercia, and that in many cases the even more rapid spread of Christianity would appear to have been hindered rather by a lack of missionary power, than by any disinclination to receive its teachings,

Meanwhile, the year 627 had been marked by the accession to the throne of Mercia of a man eminently fitted to rule a warlike but unsettled race, and destined to become the terror and the scourge of all surrounding states. King of a people to whom conflict was not only one of the conditions, but one of the pleasures of existence, Penda himself appears as the embodiment of that fierce and warlike spirit of which the religion he and his professed, was but the expression. In Mercia, at that time, a peaceful rule and an unstable rule would probably have been convertible terms ;— to Penda, peace would probably have meant obscurity and failure. Much as he has been vilified, his principal fault would appear to have been his living a century too late; his chief misfortune the reigning in a state so backward as to permit of his exercising to

their fullest extent the savage virtues which had made the Saxon invasion successful, but which the long duration of a more settled life had rendered elsewhere obsolete. His first quarrel was with his southern neighbours, the West Saxons, the record which we possess of the war from the Anglo-Saxon chronicle being as follows. "628. In this year Cynegils and Cwichelm fought against Penda at Cirencester and afterwards came to an agreement." This may serve as an instance of the brief and unsatisfactory manner in which events not to be regarded as unimportant are customarily dismissed in the chronicles of the time. There can however be little doubt that the "agreement" was one satisfactory to Penda, and that in fact it consisted in the transfer of the newly conquered Celtic territory on the northern bank of the Severn, to the kingdom of Mercia. Five years later a more important struggle, and one intimately connected with our present subject, in the invasion of Northumbria, was undertaken by Penda in conjunction with his Celtic neighbour, Cadwalla-an almost unique instance of the alliance of a Saxon king with the chieftain of a Celtic tribe for offensive purposes. In the decisive battle of Heathfield, fought in October, 633, Eadwine of Northumbria was slain with his son Osfrith, the entire Northumbrian army was destroyed, and the kingdom lay at the mercy of the conquerors. The site of this battle is supposed to have been what is now called Hatfield Chase, a few miles due east of Doncaster, and on the confines of Lincolnshire. The vanquished country was devastated with great barbarity; the Christian Cadwalla, maddened perhaps by the keen recollection of the manifold sufferings of his people, earning a sinister distinction even in those troubled times by the indiscriminate ferocity of his revenge, in which, according to Bede, "he spared neither the female sex nor the innocent age of children, but with savage cruelty put them to tormenting deaths, resolving to cut off all the race of the English within the borders of Britain." The result of this war was naturally a serious discouragement to the Christian religion, which had been so recently established in Northumbria, and to which King Eadwine had been one of the most notable and valued converts; and Penda became henceforth